Who Is Mrs. Tiger Woods?
Dec. 2 2009, Published 3:01 p.m. ET
As the sex scandal involving golf superstar Tiger Woods continues to explode, the one person who will be suffering the most is his ultra private wife, Swedish model Elin Nordegren.
While Woods golfing career has always been front and center - backed with multi-million dollar media deals - the public actually doesn’t know a lot about Mrs. Tiger Woods.
Elin Maria Pernilla Nordegren was born on January 1, 1980, and grew up in Stockholm, Sweden; she has a twin sister Josefin and an older brother.
Her mother Barbro is a Swedish politician and her father Thomas was a radio journalist who was once posted in Washington D.C.
The couple is now divorced.
Nordegren began modeling in her teens before signing-up with a New York model agency but she was never a high-profile cat-walker and pursuing that kind of lifestyle was never really her main goal
She was always interested in golf and served as a nanny to Swedish professional Jesper Parnevik while he was on tour – this is how she met Tiger Woods.
The couple first met at the British Open in 2001 and the normally confident Woods was so smitten with the tall blonde that he got a friend to ask her out, but Nordegren initially refused his invitation.
But Woods wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer and persisted to chase the woman whom he told close friends would make the perfect wife.
The couple married in October 2004 at a lavish $1.5 million ceremony in Barbados at the Sandy Lanes Resort where Hootie And The Blowfish performed and the celebrity guests included Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley.
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Nordegren then had two children relatively quickly with Woods, Sam Alexis, 2, (born June 18, 2007) and Charlie Axel nine-months, (born February 8, 2009) and has been happy to raise them away from the public spotlight.
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Although being Tiger Wood’s wife could have opened the door to Nordegren finding fame and fortune in her own right she has shunned several media offers including one from Vanity Fair.
Swedish fashion photographer Bingo Rimmer – who knows Nordegren and her family and has shot the model – said: “She said ‘no thank you’ to Vanity Fair – she is a strong woman with a lot of integrity and did not marry Tiger Woods to be seen.”
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Ironically, with the eyes of the world now on husband and marriage publicity shy Nordegren is now in the one place she does not want to be: front and center of the worldwide media spotlight.